Chapter XI: Newspaper Cuts

I

The State Convention was imminent. In the vast barrenness of the Auditorium rows upon rows of ticketed chairs were filling up with delegates, sectional banners waved in the various parts of the big hall, flags made the background for the speakers, chairs and table.

“The machinery for creating a government is in progress,” said Margaret, “what do you think of it?”

Helen shook her head.

“Inadequate. When you think why they have come, how they have come, what destinies they hold in their hands. Would women do it better I wonder, Margaret?”

“Women are more serious. Perhaps. Anyway we must try it. If we don’t like that machinery we’ll have to invent another kind.”

“Funny male gathering. Think they all have their women--and their feeling towards their own women must influence their feeling towards all of us. Their own women to treat cruelly or kindly--or possessively.”

“They’re on the last lap of their possession,” answered Margaret.

The gallery was filling with women, reporters, spectators with one interest or another. The men were taking their places, formality settling on the assembly. The temporary chairman was on the platform, welcoming them, bowing grandiloquently with a compliment that was inevitable to the ladies in the gallery. Nominations for a chairman were in order. The temporary chairman retained his place as he had expected. The committees on credentials, resolutions, organization, retired and the delegation heard with some restlessness further exhortation as to the duties which lay before them and the splendor of opportunity awaiting the party in the immediate future.

The platform was read. Cheers, a little too well organized and not too freely spontaneous, punctuated it. The women listened to it attentively, Margaret frowning now and then at some of its clauses.

It was a long task. On its consummation the convention adjourned for lunch.

It was mid-afternoon before the business of electing the delegates at large to the National Convention had been reached. Helen felt her face grow hot and her heart go a little faster even while she mocked at herself for those signs of nervousness. Margaret watched as if her finger was on the pulse of a patient.

Hedley’s name went through nomination as every one had expected. Then Jensen was on his feet.

He was good. The women admitted that after his first words. He dwelt upon the fact of suffrage, on the practical differences it made in the electorate. He spoke of the recognition of women as a privilege. Then with a reference which Helen had feared must come he spoke of the one woman whose name is “familiar to us through the fine party loyalty of her husband” and who is herself “the unspoken choice of hundreds and thousands of women of this State” as their delegate. Helen heard her name come forth unfamiliarly, heard the burst of clapping, faced the barricade of glances with a smile.

There was little doubt about it from the start. What opposition there was must have decided it unsafe to show its teeth. An hour later a discomfited man, pushed off the party slate by a woman, edged his way out of the back of the gallery and the woman was surrounded by a group of men and women, all anxious to be early in their congratulations, some from sheer enthusiasm, others from motives more questionable.

“And where is Gage passing the cigars?” asked one man jocularly.

Helen looked around as if in surprise that he was not there.

“He isn’t here, is he?”

She knew he wasn’t. She had known he wouldn’t come, even while she could not quite kill the hope that he would.

At the door were photographers, even a moving picture man waiting for the new woman delegates. Margaret dropped Helen’s hand and Helen, on Mrs. Brownley’s arm, moved past the range of picture-takers with an air of complete composure. In a moment she was in her car and moving out of sight. Margaret turned to walk back to her own apartment, complete satisfaction on her face.

II

Helen entered the house quietly and leaving her gloves and wrap on the hall bench, went into the kitchen to see how things were going there. There was a pleasant air of competence about it. The maids were busy and the dinner in active preparation. Upstairs the nurse had the children. She played with them a little, a warm sense of satisfaction at her heart. It was so absurd to choose--to fake a choice. This other work, this other business could be done without sacrificing anything. Gage was absurd. She was no less a mother, not a bit less good a housewife because she was a delegate to the Republican Convention. It took a bit of management, that was all. If she was treating Gage badly she would feel different.

But there was a guilty feeling which she could not control. He was unhappy and she the cause. They had been too close for that not to hurt.

At seven o’clock, a little late for dinner, came Gage, a guarded courtesy in his manner. He asked her pardon for not dressing and handed her a sheaf of evening papers. She was thankful that they had been issued too early to contain the news of her triumph. It postponed certain altercations. She thought suddenly of her barrage of photographers and of what she had completely forgotten, Gage’s tremendous dislike of having her picture in the papers.

“I can’t bear the thought of your picture tossed about the country--looked at casually for an hour and then used as old newspapers are used--to wrap a package--line a stair-rug--heaven knows what!”

Of course it had appeared occasionally for all of that but Helen had made the occasions infrequent. She had always liked that prejudice of his. As she looked at him to-night she thought he looked tired. There were strained lines around his eyes, and he was very silent.

She said several little things and then, because avoidance of the big topic seemed impossible, joined him in his silence. He looked at her at last, smiling a little. It was not the smile of a rancorous man but rather a hurt smile, a forced smile of one who is going to go through pain wearing it.

“I have been congratulated all the way home on your account, Helen. It seems to have been a landslide for you.”

“There was hardly any opposition.” It was meager but she could not go on without seeming to run into a forbidden or aching subject.

There they had to stop. Helen had a vision of the closed topics between them, a sudden horror of this cleavage. Suppose he didn’t see that he was foolish, that she was not treating him badly, that she must lay up something for herself as a person against the day when he himself might weary of her as a woman. Fiercely she recast her arguments in her own mind. Yet there was that tired look in his eyes. You can fight rancor but not weariness.

“How is Miss Thorstad getting on?”

“Fine. It was a great hunch. You know she actually saves me a lot of thinking. It shows that a girl with wits is worth half a dozen expert stenographers. She has an air about her that is dignified and calm and yet she’s not a stick.”

“I imagine there’s a volcanic soul under that rather calm exterior.”

“Perhaps.”

“Gage, you look tired.”

He made a visible effort to rouse himself.

“Tired? Why, no, dear. Not especially.”

“What are we to do to-night?”

“I have some work to-night.”

She looked somewhat baffled as the door closed after him a half hour later. Then going to the telephone she called Margaret. Margaret was not at home. Helen read for an hour and went to bed early.

Gage had meant to work. But he was not working. He was fighting on through a cloud of bitterness and of thoughts which he knew were not wholly unreasonable. He was sitting at his littered desk, all the paraphernalia of work strewn about him and a picture of Helen on his desk confronting him, accenting his trouble. There she was. He had only to close his eyes and he saw her even more clearly, breaking through the clouded doubts of his mind as she had done in the first days of his marriage--clearness, peace, the one real beauty in the world, the one real truth in the world--Helen--love. And she had said she wanted to be “clean of sex!” He scowled at the thought but it danced before him defiling his memories. It would not go! From those early days, those days of the “hardening process” there had persisted always in Gage secret faith, fading now to a hope, flaring now to a conviction that sex was clean, was beautiful until some other agency defiled it. He remembered still his tortured adolescent mind revolving around the problems of the mysteries of birth, stirring him to wonder and the leering clandestine ugly talk which seemed an ugly wrapping around the wonder. He had always thought that his son would have no such tortures. His own proven conviction would carry the boy through all doubts. Now he seemed cast back in the mire of his own old doubts. Had Helen always felt defiled? Had all their life been a hideous mixture of shame and complacencies and hidden revulsions? Had they really conquered nothing? Or was there nothing to conquer? Was he over-fastidious, unmanly? Was the necessary thing to blunt once more, this time permanently, these illusions of his--to go home to Helen and play the part of the demanding husband, demanding concession in return for concession? Laugh at her whims, her fads, quarrel with her if necessary. If she must run to her conventions, let her go. And let him coarsen his feeling so it was willing to take what was left of her.

He wiped his forehead impatiently. It was damp and that sign of his intensity shamed him. He had learned that the revealing of emotion was man’s shame, to be hidden at all costs. Helen had given him a final lesson in that. Angrily he flung himself into his work, concentrating actually with his will for hours, mastering the intricacies of the question on which he must give an opinion in the morning. When he had done his notes lay ready. He cleaned up the litter of papers, a little frown on his face and looked at his watch. Nearly midnight. He must go home.

All the practical machinery of locking up, starting the car, steering, driving into the garage, locking the garage, turning out the lights in the library. Nothing was different from other nights. He was a man in his own house. But over the formalism of his actions and his deliberate definiteness of conscious thought his mind was in battle. He was trying to kill the part of him that cried out against going to his wife in such a mood. He was trying deliberately to kill it with a blunt edged thought which read “Be a man--not a neurasthenic.” He cursed himself under his breath. He was no damned temperamental actor to carry on like this (Always, always, that choking necessity for repressing these feelings, concealing the fact of feeling). A married man--seven years--rights--duties--nature--foolish whims--but above that persisted the almost tortured cry of his spirit, struggling with the hotness of desire, begging, for its life--“Don’t go home like a beast to her!”

III

In the morning Helen was again worried by his appearance.

“What time did you come in, Gage?”

“About midnight.”

“You look as if you’d slept wretchedly. Did you?”

“Well, enough.” His tone was surly. He could not bear to look at her, shining haired, head held high, confidence, strength, balance of mind, justice, radiating from her. He knew what a contrast he made--she did not need to tell him of his heavy, encircled eyes, his depressed mouth.

She pushed his hair back from his forehead, standing beside his chair. It was a familiar gesture between them.

“Gage, you mean more than anything else to me. You know that?”

He mumbled an answer.

“But don’t resent it so awfully because I can’t believe that loving is a woman’s only job. We mustn’t absorb each other.”

Quoted, he thought bitterly, from Margaret Duffield. Quite reasonable too. Very reasonable. He suddenly hated her for her reasoning which was denied to his struggling instincts. All desire, all love in his heart had curdled to a sodden lump of resentment.

He picked up the paper. There was Helen, marching across the page, smiling into the camera’s eyes. Curious men with hats and crowding women showed in the blurred background. He looked from the picture to the real Helen.

“Very good picture.”

His tone was disagreeable. And he had not answered her appeal.

“Be fair, Gage.”

Very well, he would be fair.

“I haven’t the smallest sympathy with all this, Helen. I know you regard that as unreasonable. It may be that I am. But I don’t believe you’re bigger or better because of all this. You’ve done it from no spirit of conviction but because you were flattered into doing it. The Duffield girl is simply using you for her own convictions. With her they at least are convictions. But with you they’re not.”

“That’s quite enough, thanks, Gage.”

He was cruelly glad he had hurt her. How it helped the ache in his own heart!

Helen thought: “He’s jealous of Margaret. Terribly jealous. It’s abnormal and disgusting. What has happened to him?” She let him leave the house with what was almost a little life of spirits when he had gone. She had not time to sift these feelings of Gage now. Later, if they persisted. She wondered if he should see a doctor, thought for a moment of psycho-analysis, speculating as to whether that might set him straight. But the telephone began ringing frantically.